Age of Conversation 3: It’s Time to Get Busy

Posted on March 25, 2010 by amy mengel

If 2009 was the year we all sat around talking about social media, then 2010 is the year that we start doing it. It’s time to get busy! That’s the subtitle of the third installment of the Age of Conversation, a book that features the collaborative, crowdsourced effort of more than 200 authors, including yours truly.

Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton headed up the project and have assembled quite a group of social media smarties. I’m not sure how I managed to be included with the likes of Joseph Jaffe, Amber Naslund, Jacob Morgan and Karen Swim, but I’m glad to be part of an effort where 100 percent of the profits will be donated to the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

The book is broken into several sections with each author contributing a short essay or chapter. My contribution is part of the “corporate conversations” chapter and is an adaptation of a post about enhancing internal communications with social media. Other sections include “conversational branding”, “in the boardroom”, and “innovation and execution”.

Age of Conversation 3 will be available by mid-April in hardback, paperback, Kindle and iPad versions. Purchase details will be posted here.

The book’s contributors span marketing, communications, PR, branding, measurement, HR and community management functions from across the globe and from a variety of different organizations. Check out the list below:

Adam Joseph	Priyanka Sachar	Mark Earls
Cory Coley-Christakos	Stefan Erschwendner	Paul Hebert
Jeff De Cagna	Thomas Clifford	Phil Gerbyshak
Jon Burg	Toby Bloomberg	Shambhu Neil Vineberg
Joseph Jaffe	Uwe Hook	Steve Roesler
Michael E. Rubin	anibal casso	Steve Woodruff
Steve Sponder	Becky Carroll	Tim Tyler
Chris Wilson	Beth Harte	Tinu Abayomi-Paul
Dan Schawbel	Carol Bodensteiner	Trey Pennington
David Weinfeld	Dan Sitter	Vanessa DiMauro
Ed Brenegar	David Zinger	Brett T. T. Macfarlane
Efrain Mendicuti	Deb Brown	Brian Reich
Gaurav Mishra	Dennis Deery	C.B. Whittemore
Gordon Whitehead	Heather Rast	Cam Beck
Hajj E. Flemings	Joan Endicott	Cathryn Hrudicka
Jeroen Verkroost	Karen D. Swim	Christopher Morris
Joe Pulizzi	Leah Otto	Corentin Monot
Karalee Evans	Leigh Durst	David Berkowitz
Kevin Jessop	Lesley Lambert	Duane Brown
Peter Korchnak	Mark Price	Dustin Jacobsen
Piet Wulleman	Mike Maddaloni	Ernie Mosteller
Scott Townsend	Nick Burcher	Frank Stiefler
Steve Olenski	Rich Nadworny	John Rosen
Tim Jackson	Suzanne Hull	Len Kendall
Amber Naslund	Wayne Buckhanan	Mark McGuinness
Caroline Melberg	Andy Drish	Oleksandr Skorokhod
Claire Grinton	Angela Maiers	Paul Williams
Gary Cohen	Armando Alves	Sam Ismail
Gautam Ramdurai	B.J. Smith	Tamera Kremer
Eaon Pritchard	Brendan Tripp	Adelino de Almeida
Jacob Morgan	Casey Hibbard	Andy Hunter
Julian Cole	Debra Helwig	Anjali Ramachandran
Jye Smith	Drew McLellan	Craig Wilson
Karin Hermans	Emily Reed	David Petherick
Katie Harris	Gavin Heaton	Dennis Price
Mark Levy	George Jenkins	Doug Mitchell
Mark W. Schaefer	Helge Tenno	Douglas Hanna
Marshall Sponder	James Stevens	Ian Lurie
Ryan Hanser	Jenny Meade	Jeff Larche
Sacha Tueni and Katherine Maher	David Svet	Jessica Hagy
Simon Payn	Joanne Austin-Olsen	Mark Avnet
Stanley Johnson	Marilyn Pratt	Mark Hancock
Steve Kellogg	Michelle Beckham-Corbin	Michelle Chmielewski
Amy Mengel	Veronique Rabuteau	Peter Komendowski
Andrea Vascellari	Timothy L Johnson	Phil Osborne
Beth Wampler	Amy Jussel	Rick Liebling
Eric Brody	Arun Rajagopal	Dr Letitia Wright
Hugh de Winton	David Koopmans	Aki Spicer
Jeff Wallace	Don Frederiksen	Charles Sipe
Katie McIntyre	James G Lindberg & Sandra Renshaw	David Reich
Lynae Johnson	Jasmin Tragas	Deborah Chaddock Brown
Mike O’Toole	Jeanne Dininni	Iqbal Mohammed
Morriss M. Partee	Katie Chatfield	Jeff Cutler
Pete Jones	Riku Vassinen	Jeff Garrison
Kevin Dugan	Tiphereth Gloria	Mike Sansone
Lori Magno	Valerie Simon	Nettie Hartsock
Mark Goren		Peter Salvitti

A pretty impressive collection. Don’t miss out on your chance to own Age of Conversation 3 and support a great charity.

Three stellar social media eBooks

Posted on June 17, 2009 by amy mengel

One reason it can be so intimidating for organizations to get started in social media is that there’s just so much information out there. Parsing through it all and trying to figure out what’s absolutely essential to understanding the basics can take a lot of time. Here are three eBooks that I’ve found extremely useful. They cut to the chase and give you the goods on social media:

Brink: A Social Media Guide From The Edge

Todd Defren, SHIFT Communications
Key Topics: Blogger relations; multimedia content marketing; social media news releases
Share this with: Internal communications team or PR agency counsel
Why it’s stellar: It’s absolutely unbelieveable how much goodness Todd packs into 40 pages. What I love about this eBook is that it gives several great case studies of how the folks at SHIFT have integrated social media with traditional PR methods. It’s not all pie-in-the-sky stuff, though. The last half is focused on innovative tactics, with more case studies to back them up.

Getting a Foothold in Social Media

Amber Naslund, Altitude Branding
Key Topic: Building online communities
Share this with: Upper-level managers who need basic SM rundown; community and customer service leaders
Why it’s stellar: This 16-page eBook is packed with links to plenty of online resources. But what makes it great is that it’s so simple. Amber lays out a high-level game plan for getting started. At each step of the plan, she tells you why that step is important and clear steps you can take to incorporate it into your existing marketing efforts.

The Essential Guide to Social Media

Brian Solis, PR2.0
Key Topics: Social sciences behind the social technologies; customer research; social mapping
Share this with: Senior marketing staff
Why it’s stellar: Really, I could have listed any of Brian’s five eBooks here. But I like the ”Essential Guide” because it delves into the principles of effective social media participation. He of course lists all the tools and platforms available but the real meat is that Brian lays out the purpose of these tools, the social sciences behind why people are drawn to communicate online and the importance of listening and customer research. He also touches on the resources (both time and money) needed to have a successful social media presence and the importance of having appropriate company user policies and guidelines when engaging online.

Also check out this Mashable.com list from a while back that lists even more eBook resources.

Feel free to share your links to other great resources in the comments.

Ragan Recap: Communications, Chicago-style

Posted on May 10, 2009 by amy mengel

chicago I’m so exhausted after three days in Chicago that I can barely stay awake to write this post. I took in slightly more information than I did beer in the Windy City (but not by much) and want to share my impressions of the 2009 Ragan Corporate Communicators Conference and some of what I learned in the sessions.

A few of the sessions I attended were so outstanding that they warrant their own individual posts that will come later this week (stay tuned). The others were quite solid. I predominantly went to workshops on the PR/Marketing Communications track. Here’s a rundown of some of my favorites:

ComEd: Generating positive publicity when the lights are on

ComEd Communications Manager Jeff Burdick led this session and started with a slide that said: “99.95% of the time, you DO have power!” But of course, that’s not what customers want to hear during an outage. The average customer is only without power for a total of four hours in a given year. Obviously storm and outage communication is a major issue for utility companies, but during the rest of the time when everything’s buzzing along, how do they generate interest? ComEd focuses on pitching stories about reliability and infrastructure investments, its employees, environmental projects, and corporate citizenship. ComEd targets local TV news and smaller, community-based newspapers (many of which aren’t suffering and closing at the rate of large metropolitan dailies).
Key takeaway: Look for “Riches in the Niches” and leverage unique, local angles in stories. Don’t always focus on the largest media outlets

Wells Fargo: Flexible communications in the face of merging organizations

Presented by Kathleen Golden, VP of Public Relations for Wells Fargo Wealth Management Group, this session focused on the 2008 acquisition of Wachovia by Wells Fargo and the associated communications challenges. When merging the leadership of two organizations, speculation runs rampant among employees and the media. Who’s getting what job? Who’s leaving, who’s staying? Why are they structuring the new company this way? Communicators in this situation have to have the pulse of what’s being said and address any misinformation as soon as possible. But, it’s okay to tell stakeholders that you don’t have the answers yet.
Key takeaway: Establish a process for both sides of a merger to share, receive and distribute information. Address rumor and specualtion as much as possible with the information you have on hand to diffuse any issues. Involve communications early on in the merger process.

Word of Mouth Marketing – Get customers talking about you

I was a bit disappointed in Andy Sernovitz’s session, mostly because I felt he didn’t share anything beyond what you could get from his book or blog. All of the examples he used were primarily B2C companies (Skittles, Zappos, Duct Tape), which I think generally lend themselves to more viral, word-of-mouth activities and campaigns. It can be much harder to get a bunch of supply chain managers to become rabid fans of plastic fasteners or concrete forms or raw chemicals. While Andy had some good tidbits here and there, I was bummed that I skipped some of the other sessions going on at this time (including Katie Paine’s) to go to this one.
Key takeaway: Make it easy for customers to talk about your brand. Create content that they can participate in and make their own, then share with their friends.

Calculating the ROI of your communications – turning results into dollars

Angela Sinickas offered ways to measure communications efforts and show how communicators can take credit for behavior changes that earn or save money for a company. I’m not sure I fully understood her approach, as she seemed to advocate for continually adjusting either the costs incurred or the value derived to achieve the ROI result you wanted. In the corporate communications roles that I’ve held, the finance team would pretty quickly sniff out any data massaging like that. The other issue I had was that her approach relied on having good data available – which many communicators don’t always have at their disposal. But the basic concepts were intriguing and I think I’ll refer back to her slides and check her Web site out to learn more.
Key takeaway: Only behavior changes can have a dollar-value attached to them, so measure that. Calculate communications ROI on a project basis instead of trying to do it annually for an entire department.

Overall

As is usually the case, the best part of the conference was getting to meet so many great people. It was fantastic to have lunch with Katie Paine and see Shonali Burke at the cocktail hour. I got to meet Amber Naslund, Rachel Esterline and Ari Adler at the unconference. I hit the town with Mike Pilarz, Allan Schoenberg and Amber Porter Cox. I had my first Bell’s Beer (and my second, and my third…) and took an extra day with my good friend and travel companion Christine Hartter (who also wrote a great conference recap) to check out The Bean and the Art Institute. Verdict: Chicago is my kinda town!

Image via Flickr user amymengel (thanks to the waiter who snapped the pic above!)

Your day-by-day guide to social media

Posted on April 29, 2009 by amy mengel

Most of us aren’t lucky enough to have a personal assistant who maps out our schedule for us each week and tells us exactly where to go, when to be there and what to expect. With so much information on social media rip-roaring through the interwebz and changing constantly, it’s hard to keep up! But I’ve got your back. Take a deep breath and refer to this day-by-day guide to help you keep up with popular weekly goings-on in social media:

Sunday

#blogchat, 9 p.m. ET
Started just a few weeks ago when Mack Collier spontaneously added the #blogchat hashtag to one of his tweets, this Twitter chat has grown steadily in the last month. The unmoderated and free-flowing dialogue allows bloggers to discuss topics ranging from guest posting to how to promote a blog to blog analytics to ghost blogging. The most recent chat generated a 71-page transcript (!) that Connie Reece makes available at her site.

Also on Sundays, check out Social Marketing Update, a show on BlogTalkRadio produced by Ken English and Dr. Ron Capps (aka NicheProf) that airs at 12:30 p.m. ET (all episodes are archived at the site).

Monday

#journchat, 8-11 p.m. ET
PR professionals, bloggers and journalists alike participate in this weekly Twitter chat designed for these groups to learn about and from each other. It’s moderated by Sarah Evans, who collects questions through Twitter or e-mail leading up to the chat and then uses the @journchat account to ask selected questions to the group. It moves fast, so use TweetGrid, TweetChat, or a dedicated column in TweetDeck to keep up! The last 30 minutes are reserved for pitching – one pitch apiece, and no spam!

Tuesday

Social Mediasphere TV, 8 p.m. ET
Jim Turner, aka @Genuine, produces this weekly event that’s part radio show, part livestream, and part chat. He’s invited guests such as Amber Naslund, Keith Burtis and Micah Baldwin (who call in via Skype) to discuss topics like personal branding, what it takes to be a social media rockstar, and the ethics of Twitter. Jim’s humor (often self-deprecating), the insights from his guests, and the contributions from those participating via the online chat make this one a must-see.

Wednesday

Reading day
I used to love “reading day” in college, which was a more succinct way of saying “The University is giving you a day off from classes at the end of the semester to study for exams, but it’s really just an excuse for you to go out late on a weeknight and sleep in the next morning.” Spend Wednesday catching up on all the posts that have piled up in your feed reader. Check out Jeremiah Owyang’s weekly digest of the social networking space (published on Sundays) and browse through Mashable‘s feed to see what’s new. And of course, catch up on all those tweets you favorited (as a way to bookmark for later) that include links to great blog posts recommended by those you follow.

Thursday

For Immediate Release/The Hobson & Holtz Report Podcast
This podcast actually comes out twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson have been producing this series for four years. Each podcast episode is approximately an hour long and topics focus on the “intersection of online communication and public relations.” Interviews, book reviews and speeches/speakers from a variety of communications conferences are also often included in the podcast, which you can subscribe to via RSS or iTunes.

Friday

#followfriday
I’ll admit that this Twitter trend has seemed a bit tired lately – especially when people simply tweet lists of follower names with no recommendation or rationale for why you should follow someone. It can border on spamminess. Essentially the idea is that you recommend people you think others should follow by adding the #followfriday hashtag to your tweet containing their user name. I’ve gotten away from doing this lately, but I still do discover new people every week based on recommendations. Twitter has discontinued listing #followfriday as a trending topic on its home page, but you can still check out the stream of recommendations by typing #followfriday into Twitter search, or you can check out TopFollowFriday.

Saturday

Dude, get a life. It’s Saturday. Go outside. Call your mother. Drink a beer.

Are corporate communicators hopeless in social media?

Posted on April 21, 2009 by amy mengel

Have you ever had an experience where someone says something that makes you immediately cringe, but you also know that they’re at least partly right? I had that reaction a week ago listening in on Social Mediasphere TV, Jim Turner’s weekly show on Ustream. His panelists included several social media rockstars, among them Amber Naslund. Amber was asked if she had to replace herself in her role as Director of Community at Radian6, what would she look for in a candidate? The first thing Amber said she wouldn’t want is someone with a communications background. Ouch! Here’s her transcribed response:

I actually probably don’t want somebody with a communications background..sorry communications people…but the truth is there’s a lot of preconceived notions in corporate communications that are very, very difficult to undo and part of the reason that social media is struggling for adoption inside of established companies is that they’re having trouble jettisoning the old ideas they have about how and what to communicate to their customers.

So, if I were replacing myself I would actually want someone who is closer to a rookie and somebody who has the passion for connecting with people. I came up through a nonprofit fundraising background and to be perfectly frank when we were fundraisers we weren’t taught a lot about proper corporate communication practices. We were taught that connecting with the donors about the story behind the organization was what was going to connect with them at a level that compelled them to want to support it. I go back to those tenets a lot in my community work.

So if I was going to replace me I would probably look for a grassroots nonprofit type person who is really plugged into the people and not so much plugged in to their MBA textbook that’s collecting dust on the shelf. And I’d look for somebody that has a bunch of unrefined skills that is eager to get out there and do really good, hard work . This is not a 9-5 job, so I need somebody with the work ethic that can dedicate themselves to it but I want somebody with kind of a fresh slate because I don’t want somebody whose ideas I have to undo.

My initial reaction to Amber’s answer was to cringe, wince and recoil. I’ve got six years of corporate communications under my belt (and a shelf full of dusty MBA textbooks too, for that matter) and now the rockstar of social media rockstars is telling me that I’m not likely to be a good fit for a social media job? Yikes.

But then I stopped to really think about what Amber said (and it’s why I waited a week to write this post). Her basic tenet is that a lot of corporate communicators still want to control how, when and what is communicated to customers. They’re trying to fit a square social media peg into a round corporate communications hole, and it’s not working. They rely on models, rules, diagrams, pie charts or PowerPoint slides to define effective communication. And by they, I also mean me– at least a part of the time. I admit that I sometimes tend to fit communications strategies into my company’s current operating framework rather than challenging that framework and looking for more effective ways of reaching customers. Sometimes I get caught up in the process and mechanics of communication and forget to focus on telling a compelling story.

However, I don’t think that means professionals with a communications background couldn’t be effective in a community-focused social media role. Amber talks about not being able to “undo” a corporate communicator’s old ideas. It is hard to jettison those ideas when you’re still at a company that reinforces them. But I do think many corporate communicators are aware of the strictures that are often placed on us and in some cases are frustrated by them. Once they step away, some of those preconceived notions can be undone pretty quickly, primarily because they don’t have HR, legal, marketing or operations underscoring them right and left. Sometimes all it takes is a change in scenery.

I’m sure Amber’s right in that a young, scrappy, go-getter fundraising type would make a great community manager. But I wouldn’t entirely count out folks with communications backgrounds. Some of us may just be looking for the opportunity to undo some of our ideas. What do you think? Is it a matter of the corporate culture driving communicators’ approaches, or communicators in corporations clinging to their “old ideas?” How can corporate communications pros make a transition into a role like Amber’s?

Image via Flickr user danstorey14

Amy Mengel

I used to have a blog here.

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